What do the composers Mozart, Debussy, Couperin, Ravel, Messager, Charpentier, Franck and Gounod all have in common? They have all lent their name to one of the blocks of flats in the “Pigeonnier” suburb of Amiens labelled a “sensitive ghetto” by the French authorities as it was home to numerous riots in the 1990s. “The more shameful the building, the more famous the composer was it was named after. It was something of a sociological experiment, it seems”, recalls Karim Bel Kacem, who lived at 23 rue Couperin until he was 17 years old.

Karim Bel Kacem began to tell this story in The Civil Wars, Milo Rau’s play on civic commitment amongst young Europeans. While France was only just beginning to realise the consequences of its disastrous urban planning of the past thirty years, the young artist returned to the place where he grew up. The decision to turn it into a musical piece was an obvious one – what if this clumsy and potentially condescending “sociological” study of place names could actually make some sense of it all? And what if the sublime Leçons de ténèbres composed by Couperin had something to teach about the issue of young people left to their own devices in the shadow of cement and great music?